This sounds profound to liberals who haven’t thought much about history and are grasping to understand why their abstract universalism isn’t working in practice. To a historian, it’s simply malpractice. Essentializing a nation isn’t explanation but the refusal to explain. 1/
My first boss, David Remnick, interviews Stephen Kotkin, the king of Soviet history and the reason I went into this whole Russia business, and the result does not disappoint. Holy shit.
The single best report I’ve read on the US chips blockade against China—a strong overview of the issue but more important, it cuts through technical issues to show the true significance.
The US is telling China to accept defeat or go to war.
Some quotes:
“More than 900 women have died at the hands of their husbands or partners since China’s law against domestic violence was enacted in 2016, according to Beijing Equality, a women’s rights group.”
The slogan “支持新疆棉花” (support Xinjiang cotton) really beautifully captures the new era of capitalism. The justification has changed from hollow individualism to repugnant nationalism but the deeper principle remains the same: human life must serve the commodity.
This is false and anyone who knows the research on Belt and Road or has taken part in it knows it’s false.
Saying this poisons the relationship with China and discredits the US. What then is the point, except to rally the US and allies for conflict with China?
Biden takes a swipe at China's Belt and Road infrastructure initiative:
"The Belt and Road initiative turns out to be a debt and confiscation program -- not going very far," Biden says at an appearance with PM Sunak of the UK.
Simply astonishing—China is on track to install more solar power capacity *this year* than the entire existing US capacity.
Big questions remain about whether power storage can keep pace and when coal capacity—itself expanding quickly—will be shut down.
Yesterday Biden met with Italy’s reactionary nativist prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
On the agenda: containing China and Russia. Not on the agenda: democracy, human rights, social inclusion—the reasons Biden gives to justify geopolitical conflict. 1/
Great powers gathering intelligence on each other is one of the most banal and universal facts of international relations. It in no way threatens regular people UNLESS those countries are on the road to serious conflict.
One way to judge whether serious conflict is approaching…
Instead, the description of what Russia “is” becomes, by pure tautology, the explanation for why it’s like that. That it has been like this in the past then proves this is its essence. 3/
What this graph actually reflects: 1) China is the only major country to achieve development breakthrough under free market globalization; 2) failure of market globalization to drive up wages in the rest of the world—an enormous drag on effective demand across the global economy.
The US attempt to freeze China in a permanently subordinate position is not only geopolitically explosive, it marks a fundamental change in the global economy from free market ideology to might-makes-right interstate conflict. We’ve been through this before—it doesn’t end well.
Would be great to see one op-ed from an American that says something like "The United States doesn't get to decide what technologies China builds just because we're scared we might not always be ahead of them."
That is clearly illustrated here. If this is what Russia “is”, then it cries out for historical explanation—how did it come to be like this? Might not subordination within an international hierarchy have contributed to this supposed civilizational personality? 2/
Undoubtedly Sullivan thinks himself a hardheaded realist. But this level of unreality—that the US could sideline China like this; that climate could be solved without China’s buy-in; that US could lead the world while institutionally paralyzed—can only be explained by ideology.
And not, say, that similar social conditions producing similar effects existed in the past—such as structural inequality in the global system. Using the past in this way is not the mark of a historian but a repudiation of the historian’s practice. 4/
@adam_tooze
Every time I use this graph in a presentation, part of the audience mistakes the US column for the y-axis. It’s a real gut-punch when they realize the truth
Very sad to see this.
The correct phrasing is “ARE YOU NOW or have you ever been a member…”
A terrible failure of civics education. Senators these days don’t even know their own history smh
Tom Cotton: "Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?"
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew: "Senator, I'm Singaporean. No!"
Cotton: "Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?"
Chew: "No, Senator. Again, I'm Singaporean!"
It’s a toxic analysis at any time but all the more so now, when nationalist essentializing on all sides is impelling a global rush to conflict. This same reactionary essentializing is very much alive in Russia—but not because of the Russian soul! /5
The growing talk of diametrically opposed cultural essences on both sides registers this sense that globalization-era universalism was always an illusion. But there is no essence; that sense of uncovering the true nature of both sides is an outcome of the disintegration...
It’s now common to say the Chinese leadership will engage in foreign adventures, up to and including full-scale war, to distract from troubles at home. I can’t think of a single case in the history of the PRC. Has anyone made a real argument for this, not just asserted it?
The key difference between China threat fearmongers and the rest of us is not specific evidence or philosophical commitments.
It’s whether, when you read about the Chinese state doing perfectly banal things that all kinds of states do, you hear ominous music in the background.
Republicans want to give special tax privileges to rich kids who don’t work for their wealth. That would be a great attack line for the Democrats—except that corporate Democrats are on the Republican side. Good piece from
@ThePlumLineGS
.
We oppose the Chinese govt, not Chinese people?
Bombarded with stories of a threatening monolithic China to the exclusion of human stories of Chinese people, it’s hardly surprising these individuals disappear and we perceive them “penetrating” our institutions like enemy agents.
Many policymakers were surprised by how far Chinese researchers penetrated research institutions. “In collaborations, China dominates its relationships with academic partners.”
Total share* (vertical axis) and proportion for top eight research collaborators with China
@ft
This is highly misleading. Biden’s industrial policy does echo China’s, but the blockade on advanced tech and policies specifically excluding Chinese companies from key markets—precisely the measures China finds threatening—are purely USA.
Instead of belittling everything China seeks to do, why not praise the parts that are helpful and encourage China to get Russia to the table? The US is so fixated on preventing Chinese success that it’s missing potentially significant diplomatic openings.
This is coming from the country’s top *diplomat* who has been pursuing *diplomacy* with China. If he’s being disingenuous, it’s troubling. If he’s being genuine, even more troubling.
Antony Blinken: "As a practical matter, those sanctions don’t prevent the minister from engaging or us engaging with him, so there’s no practical impediment. It is a political decision, in effect, for China to decide whether or not he should be engaged."
is that banal and universal behaviors are recast as a uniquely sinister characteristic of the antagonist alone, commentators scream about the perfidy of the other, and these one-sided attacks are used to whip up popular nationalism.
Some further thoughts in this talk on how Americans are casting their supposed enemies as illiberal by nature and essentializing themselves as liberal by nature—thereby providing the ideology for their own fundamentally illiberal social transformation.
This argument is empirically wrong: the status quo is eroding all over the world (China and the US too)—indicating structural dysfunction that requires deep changes on all sides, not bickering over blame. The argument is also reactionary: the status quo was unjust to begin with.
The reason this perspective is wrong is that it assumes the U.S. has the agency and the power when it comes to starting Cold War 2. This is entirely backwards. The U.S. is a status quo power; the ball is almost entirely in China's court.
A significant but little known incident took place early in the Obama admin: Japan had just elected a non-LDP govt for the first time. The new PM, Hatoyama Yukio, was gingerly suggesting greater independence from the US on neoliberal economics and geopolitical issues— 1/
Two years ago, more than 70% of Okinawans voted against continued US military presence there. It was overruled by Tokyo. To just sarcastically say, "oh, are we occupying Japan? They want us there." Who does? Militarism is so reflexive. We have a lot of work to do.
I’m very pleased to be joining the
@QuincyInst
, where I’ll be doing what I can to halt the rush to US–China conflict and create a new foundation for constructive relations.
A conceptual feature of liberal US discourse on China is to see authoritarian features of the Chinese political regime as unchanging essence while waving away authoritarian features of the US political regime, such as the criminalization system, as errors open to correction. 1/
A thread on the path to World War I. Parallels between UK–Germany conflict then and US–China conflict today—and the obliviousness of elites conducting it—make it urgent to learn this now largely forgotten history. Excerpts from J. Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 2nd ed.
For
@thenation
, I have a detailed comparison of China and Russia over the last forty years. That history has shaped distinct ruling elites with fundamentally different global orientations—opening opportunities that the US is in danger of slamming shut.
“keeping the Cold War cold”—the Cold War killed literally millions of people. The US foreign policy establishment has never faced that, in no small part because most of those killed were poor and black or brown. That fact all by itself is eloquent condemnation of the US record.
I see some disagree that we got alot right post-1945. My list includes turning back aggression (NK vs SK, Iraq vs Kuwait), keeping the Cold War cold & ending it on our terms, & promoting a world of increased life spans, living standards, & freedom. Not bad
I’ve had people in the DC bubble tell me that “everyone knows” this or that about China—and it’s something squarely at odds with scholarship on the question. That’s a really alarming sign of groupthink already being deeply ingrained and actively excluding other views.
One of the most vital lessons of the Iraq war is the importance of welcoming—or at least protecting space for—dissenting views, especially when it comes to the use of military force.
My new piece in
@ForeignPolicy
@GideonGradishar
In fact I’m emphasizing the military angle. Trying to prevent development in China ensures military conflict down the road.
The alternative is to reform the global system so it excludes no one—so the US and China pursuing their interests benefits rather than threatens the other.
Nothing specifically Chinese here, it’s just the old program of conservative bourgeois family values. But this is an essential point that puts the lie to irresponsible speculation about a sharp left turn. Xi Jinping’s politics has much more in common with Bismarck than with Mao.
A debilitating habit in geopolitical analysis: behavior well explained by a complex, fragmented society, parochial interests, and official complacency is instead cast as a sinister conspiracy by a monolithic state.
“China’s secret strategy to…” is QAnon for the natsec community
Perhaps that's exactly what Beijing is deliberately doing. Making tourism practically impossible without introducing a flat-out ban. This still enables talking about people-to-people exchanges. Just not on Chinese soil.
My new piece in
@ForeignAffairs
. Conflating democracy with US power only makes sense if you ignore all the struggling democracies of the Global South. A foreign policy genuinely centered on democracy would focus on democratizing the global economy.
It’s tempting to read this as cynically exploiting the prevalence of Sinophobia in DC to defend concentrated corporate power against recent challenges, but I think it’s deeper (and scarier) than that. 1/
Eric Schmidt ex google CEO: "asked about growing global backlash against tech giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google “These gross proposals like breaking them up and so forth, it’s not going to be helpful because it’s going to set us back against China,
From
@Gregory_C_Allen
: “The new policy embodied in Oct. 7 is: Not only are we not going to allow China to progress any further technologically, we are going to actively reverse their current state of the art.”
And most chilling of all, from the blockade administrator in Commerce
@BISgov
, who—given the embrace of the blockade across DC—is reflecting a consensus for great power violence:
The fact that the vast majority of natsec types cannot see this shows very clearly that “national security” as a concept is only tenuously connected to—and as a practice is often diametrically opposed to—the welfare of people in the United States.
Forget China
Forget Russia
Forget Iran
Forget [whatever other country you're getting paid to fearmonger about]
Getting the world vaccinated is the US's biggest security priority right now.
#TRIPSwaiver
From
@EmilyKilcrease1
: “We said there are key tech areas that China should not advance in. And those happen to be the areas that will power future economic growth and development.”
For
@newrepublic
,
@sansfraser
and I argue that the US and China each need to stop dismissing the insecurities on the other side, cease aggravating those insecurities, and start talking about a global order that would allow both to thrive.
I have a new piece out in
@DissentMag
reviewing
@IsabellaMWeber
’s excellent new book and reflecting on how China’s revolutionary history allowed it to narrowly evade shock therapy and pursue an unusual state-forward path into neoliberalism.
“The profits [on vaccine sales] we’re seeing are magnitudes larger than what it would cost to fully vaccinate the poorest countries in the world,” said Anna Bezruki, a researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
For
@RStatecraft
, I try to weigh which is the most dire threat to America: a permanent state of hostility with the second most powerful country on Earth, or a balloon
I’m not sure if the new Cold War will be able to beat Cold War classic in the total number of violent deaths it produces, but so far it’s way out ahead in achieving self-parody
All the analysis quoted here is well-supported in the scholarly literature.
The belligerent DC debate excludes research that doesn’t fit the preconceived agenda, so people have to cover their ears and shout “you’re a traitor and I can’t hear you” when exposed to it.
👀 Per congressional staff:
@QuincyInst
is pinging offices on
@committeeonccp
/
@CmteOnCCPDems
.
Its message: America should cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party on Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative.
Once again, Quincy is advancing the CCP's interests at America's expense.
For
@RStatecraft
, I argue that US leaders’ bid to expropriate TikTok is an attempt to evade the real problems of social media and another small step toward losing forever a peaceful and inclusive global system.
The substance of this racist tirade—and quite a bit of the language (“kowtow”)—is indistinguishable from US public discussion on China. The only important difference is the claims that are usually targeted against the abstract “China” are here directed at Chinese people.
Incredible that an image of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—the most American thing in the world—is used here to trigger Americans’ racial fears of sinister Chinese secretly pulling the strings.
When the members of this congressional committee repeat the mantra…
COMING SOON: ‘Hollywood Takeover’, a documentary that illuminates how the Chinese Communist Party influences and alters American films to align with its authoritarian agenda.
More Info:
lol Palantir, whose business model is indistinguishable from the Chinese surveillance state, whose business was built on IP theft, and whose chair is Peter “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible” Thiel
100 incidents of Chinese nationals “gate-crashing” US military bases over several years seems a bit less ominous when you get to the part about 10,000 people who aren’t supposed to be there being turned away from US bases EVERY DAY.
An important warning from
@MarcusMStanley
: the TikTok hysteria is not just more fuel on the fire of confrontation with China, it’s moving legislation that points toward a new era of domination by the national security state.
What is China’s position on Ukraine? Anxiety.
This is Party mouthpiece Renmin ribao during the daylight hours in China following the start of Putin’s aggression—no mention of Ukraine on the entire front page, a single oblique reference to the crisis buried far down (pic 3). 1/
I found a lot to like in Sullivan’s speech on the global economy (though much depends on the administration actually doing some key things he discussed that we haven’t seen so far).
However, I saw two fatal flaws—and I mean “fatal” literally. 1/
The speed with which US–China tension has moved to serious proposals for WWIII is terrifying. The internal forces on both sides inflating threat perceptions and creating a security dilemma are extremely powerful. We have to change that as soon as possible or face disaster. 1/
I want to better understand the thinking behind this, which says when the G7 intervenes in the market for public purposes it’s “market-oriented” but when China does it it’s “non-market”. Anyone have sources making this case in detail?
@Tim_L_Meyer
,
@jennifermharris
,
@Brad_Setser
?
@corpavsafety
@Danushkatch
@JoshuaPotash
@AbbottGlobal
From the article:
“Asked why the materials needed to be thrown away, [Abbott CEO] Ford cited a limited shelf life. But photographs taken in June and July of some of the estimated 8.6m Abbott test cards employees said were shredded show expiration dates more than 7 months away.”
For
@thenation
, I argue that Newsom’s trip to China shows a different and hopeful way to conduct diplomacy. Progress on US–China cooperation without abandoning criticism is possible—if the US leads with basic respect and shared interests.
From the Chinese readout on the Biden–Xi call this morning—the sharpest signal yet that China considers US economic restrictions second only to Taiwan in potential for conflict.
This is very dangerous because, unlike on Taiwan, US leaders aren’t taking these warnings seriously.
Wtf
@jaketapper
@CNN
. This guy has a 20 year plus record of being wrong about China. The only reason he still has any platform despite all that is that he developed a role for himself as a MAGA ideologue and hack and one of Tucker Carlson’s favorite guests
Legitimate question—does anyone have a citation for this?
There’s an ongoing problem of people making sweeping characterizations of Chinese malice without showing their work. It offends me as a scholar but it’s also diplomatic malpractice.
From the communique issued by the NATO summit in Vilnius: "The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values." When and where were these ambitions "stated" by Beijing?
Assuming someone did say this to him (the line has been around a long time), they were being polite. The Global South got much more than lectures—they got devastated economies, wrecked health systems, and worse inequality via IMF/WB programs. Summers is as responsible as anyone.
I do think in many ways the most profound question for American foreign policy, and it’s one that very much implicates economic policy, is that as right and just as we feel we are, there are just a large number of countries that are not aligned with us or that are only weakly
The clumsy democracy vs autocracy framework is simply incapable of dealing with this reality: a crucial factor in the failure of China’s political liberalization is that growth and development within the so-called liberal international order demands the repression of labor.
The main reason the US foreign policy establishment sees Russian violence as different from similar episodes of US violence is the ideology of US power=democracy. But that ideology is also—usually unconsciously—a racial ideology. Great example here of the id breaking through 1/
Some fascinating details in this report on the Biden–Xi meeting. In particular, I found Xi’s insistence on making a systematic justification of the Chinese political system to be revealing.
Americans very rarely take seriously the Party’s self-understanding, they imagine it’s 1/
“Maybe—just maybe!—the balloon will convince the American people to support us in creating a world-consuming international conflict” is one of the saddest wish fulfillment fantasies I’ve ever seen
This from the man who in 2020—on the very anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party deploying its military to crush democracy protesters at Tian’anmen Square—published an op-ed calling for the US military to crush large-scale protests across America.
The Quincy Institute isn’t just a hotbed of pro-Iran lobbying and antisemitism, now it’s shilling for Chinese communists in Congress.
But not really surprising from the Blame America First crowd.
The issue here is that the rich countries have been blaming China for failure to reduce debts while studiously ignoring the private lenders from their own countries that are the bigger obstacle. Media in the rich countries mostly allow themselves to be led around the nose on this
The Financial Times has for once printed a graph which actually shows which external lenders are owed debt by lower income countries (rather than saying it is all China)
This still does not show the interest rates - which are highest on the private loans
The rich countries keep talking up a confrontation by doing opinion polls about China that include only the rich countries. They’re in for quite a shock when we get to the proxy wars phase of the conflict and people in the Global South prove less enamored of the rich countries.
Confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping remains at or near historic lows in most places surveyed, while confidence in the U.S. president is up substantially following Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Great piece. Important to note that this is not about ignorance. Geopolitics is actively dehumanizing because it instrumentalizes millions and usually leads to mass killing. It always treats the home nation as more valuable than others. Dehumanization is *caused by* geopolitics.
"As a Chinese woman studying China in the US, I’m constantly stunned by the blinding whiteness in this field."
What happens to understandings of a country when it's seen first as a geopolitical abstraction, not a place real people live? I write
@guardian
:
Many thanks to
@EricLevitz
for inviting me to do this interview. Whether the dispute is US vs China or free trade vs protectionism, the solution is not to pick one side or the other but to break out of the binary, strengthening labor and the Global South.
1. The idea “all Chinese are brainwashed to hate America” is not only embarrassingly wrong, it’s a direct path to racist violence and an outright repudiation of the “we don’t hate Chinese people, only the govt” shibboleth.
2. Interesting double elision in the argument. First, …
This is so embarrassing. Dude is Rear Admiral and Commander of Office of Naval Intelligence! “Most Chinese fully believe [we are the number 1 enemy].” Just absolute nonsense. How does it help us for powerful folks like this guy to be so friggin’ ignorant??
With alarming speed and almost no public debate about the immense dangers, the US foreign policy establishment has forsaken the idea of a global system defined by mutual gain through open exchange in favor of zero-sum conflict between geopolitical blocs.
My main point here is that we have entered a new age of competition — this is not a competition of countries. It is a competition of coalitions. & the US is making hard choices & investments now so that we will be a more effective partner in the future.
#IISSMD22
O’Sullivan: a top ideologist of US hegemony and a top supervisor in the military-industrial complex, with a notable history in military aggression and fossil fuels.
Yet only Harvard is mentioned in her op-ed arguing climate cooperation is “not just folly, but also irresponsible”
I was pleased to join
@CBSNews
last night for immediate reactions to the Biden–Xi summit and Biden’s press conference.
It’s troubling to see all the commenters incredulous…
Chinese interests could be in alignment or even supportive of American goals, highlighting why the U.S. would want a stable relationship with the second most powerful country in the world, explains Jake Werner, the acting director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute.
Head of the committee, Mike Gallagher, says its purpose is “to win this new Cold War with Communist China”. He calls TikTok “digital fentanyl”. These are very troubling signs for where the committee intends to go.
We need a serious national conversation on China policy - not more xenophobia, Cold War posturing, and scapegoating from the GOP. Why would anyone trust them to lead responsibly on this important issue? I am voting NO on their push for a new Select Committee.
There are a lot of consequential differences between centrist and progressive Democrats on politics, policy, and larger social vision, but this exchange dramatizes the moral stakes of the contest within the party more starkly than anything I’ve seen before.
Aside from the disturbing fearmongering about the most banal thing imaginable, this article is a good illustration of how great power conflict wrecks a society’s critical faculties, making us blind to how similar we are to the “enemy”.
Those dismissing the possibilities of US–China climate partnership because they prefer great power conflict are just not aware of the opportunities we’ll never know we missed.
Leadership like that of
@JerryBrownGov
and
@GavinNewsom
is now rare in DC.
At the House Select Committee on China’s grilling of Biden officials. The admin says China wants to undermine the international order, rather than admitting that China is a status quo power with desire for reform—same as the US.
US leaders are always so impatient with “historical” grievances in East Asia—the possibility never even crosses their mind that those grievances survive today because patterns of power and inequality *in the present* recapitulate the “historical” structure of colonialism.
The US hates to be called an empire and loves to play up its anticolonial credentials (see: Ukraine). But if it cannot countenance even mild independence by postcolonial states and consistently backs their *former colonizers* - which legacy has it actually taken up?
A US grand strategy focused on securing global public goods through common but differentiated responsibilities would be good for people in poor countries and in rich countries, good for workers and (non-rentier) businesses, and very good for US prestige. Instead we have this.
Scoop: The US rejected China's offer to opt out of a
@wto
patent waiver for vaccines, saying the text needs to clearly exclude China.
This may jeopardize a nearly 2-year effort to ease IP rules for producing Covid-19 vaccines
A number of people who a few years ago wanted a “tougher” China policy are today surprised and panicked that it’s moving us toward war.
If they’re not publicly rethinking the analytical framework that blinded them to the logic of runaway confrontation, they have no credibility.
Some of us have been warning for years that a containment-only policy would create toxic dynamics with China and in US politics that would inevitably overwhelm whatever “reasonable” limits the Biden admin had in mind. Some admin self-reflection is past due
This is not to deny that there are real and serious problems with Belt and Road. But if you actually wanted to address those problems, you would try to work with China on shared interests rather than saying that everything China does is a sinister plot to dominate others.
Hicks is simply incredulous that she is even being asked to account for what her department—the majority of federal employees—does with its enormous resources. Shows how rare it is for anyone in our so-called democracy to pose tough questions to military leadership.
Exchange between
@jonstewart
and
@DepSecDef
Kathleen Hicks on the defense budget: "I can't figure out how $850 billion to a department means that the rank and file still have to be on food stamps. To me, that's fucking corruption."
For a few years I had the privilege of teaching large selections from Wealth of Nations. Smith was an incredible, complex, contradictory thinker—a serious effort to work through his ideas is very rewarding. In contrast, a hack like this ought to have no place on the left.
From
@ThePlumLineGS
on Republicans’ recent school censorship efforts. Despite their unhinged Sinophobia, Republicans are indistinguishable from the Chinese state—sanitizing history in the name of unity. Content may differ, but rightwing nationalism everywhere takes the same form.
The way national security is eating up every other realm in both the US and China is extremely alarming. Even more alarming that, though each recognizes a serious problem on the other side, they think their own militarist transformation is completely justified.
This from
@RepUnderwood
is the single most incisive diagnosis I’ve seen of Congress’s remarkable focus on bills aimed at excluding China from America and the world.
From
@blaise_malley
’s write-up of a
@FP4America
event.
This from the man who a few years ago—on the very anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party deploying its military to crush democracy protesters at Tian’anmen Square—published an op-ed calling for the US military to crush large-scale protests across America.
Of course the Quincy Institute would reflexively take the Chinese Communist Party's side.
No American lawmaker should take the Quincy Institute seriously.
Since 2012, twelve of 2,600 (0.46%) misconduct complaints against Minneapolis PD have led to discipline, with a 40-hour suspension the harshest punishment.
“The head of the police union, Lt. Bob Kroll, is himself the subject of at least 29 complaints.”